Afghanistan, again.

The day after the President’s West Point speech on Afghanistan I got this e-mail from VP Biden’s office (via the administration’s information distribution system):

Last night, President Obama laid out his plan to defend our national interest by refocusing our efforts on three clear goals: defeating al Qaeda, stabilizing Pakistan, and breaking the Taliban's momentum in Afghanistan.

To achieve these goals, the President has authorized the rapid deployment of 30,000 more troops in Afghanistan, with a firm commitment to begin bringing our troops home in 2011.

It's a clean break from the failed Afghanistan policy of the Bush administration, and a new, focused strategy that can succeed.

Our new strategy ends the era of blank checks for Afghanistan's leaders, facilitates a responsible transition to Afghan security forces, and begins bringing our troops home in 2011.

I thought the speech was very good, as a speech, and I thought the President did pretty much the only thing he could do given the strong feelings on both ends of the spectrum. He’s taking the middle ground, and that is necessary given the political situation, but as everyone knows, when you walk in the middle ground you get shot at from both sides.

The problem I have with all of this stems from the initial impulse to go to “war” with “extremism.” Unfortunately, what we are fighting is an idea and a belief, not an army, and I have believed from the very beginning that treating our “enemy” as if it were one identifiable group of people located in a narrow specific geographic location is a losing approach. The President’s reasons for being in Afghanistan are reasonable. The desire to leave a stable government there is laudable. The desire to make our borders safe is comforting. But I don’t think any amount of military force, particularly concentrated in one country, will defeat the beliefs that are our real enemy.